Was Harvey Milk Assassination Justified

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” This is the most famous quote of Harvey Milk, who served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for 11 months in 1978. However, his term was brutally cut short because he was assassinated by former supervisor Dan White; this quote, came from one of Milk’s wills, which he recorded due to his fear of being assassinated (“The Official Harvey Milk Biography”, para 15). Milk had many reasons to be afraid of getting killed while in office: as the first openly gay official to be elected in the U.S., he faced discrimination and disapproval from all directions, and is now regarded as a prominent figure in the gay rights movement. Although some may have sympathized with White and argued that he was not mentally stable in the time surrounding the shooting, in reality, the assassination of New York mayor Harvey Milk was in no way justified because he was a kind and person and made leaps of progress while serving as supervisor. When he first ran for office, Harvey Milk was not taken seriously by many San Francisco residents, and it came as a surprise when he was elected on January 9th, 1978. However, Milk had already made

People, especially the jury during his trial—which excluded minorities and was comprised of many conservative citizens— felt pity for the man who had quit his job as supervisor and wanted it back, only to be denied by Moscone and supposedly laughed at by Milk. Whether it be the infamous “twinkie defense” proposed at his trial that claimed White consumed junk food due to depression and was mentally unstable (Avery) or the “gay panic” defense, which claimed that White was under pressure because of the demands of the gay community (The Times of Harvey Milk), there is no justifiable reason for Milk’s